Over the last few weeks you started to ruin our relationship by not allowing Twitter to display images directly in tweets. What was once a smooth, near seamless integration of images and text was turned into a two-step process where we had to click on a link in the tweet to see the image.

You took the polish off the pics.

While that was, to say the least, disappointing, yesterday you made an announcement that has moved us from tolerating you making our online lives just that little bit more difficult to making us think you've not just lost your grasp of our relationship, you've also decided to take advantage of us.

... you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service ...

This is all brand new language in the ToS and I suspect that this is more of the same bad thinking that seems to be guiding Facebook's revenue strategy.

What you're saying is you want us to carry on posting our photos to Instagram and you can resell them to anyone you please. Not only do we have no say in who uses the photos and how, we get no compensation!

Does that sound reasonable? Well, I guess to you it does but to us, your user base, it sounds predatory, opportunistic, over-reaching, and bordering on the unethical.

So, Instagram, this is it. We're done. I could have put up with you messing around with Twitter but taking advantage of me? Not going to happen. That sudden tiny loss you might have just felt? That was me deleting my account.

Legal documents are easy to misinterpret. So I’d like to address specific concerns we’ve heard from everyone ...

Which can be taken to either mean "we crafted a poor ToS" or "you just don't understand us." Systrom continued:

From the start, Instagram was created to become a business. Advertising is one of many ways that Instagram can become a self-sustaining business, but not the only one. Our intention in updating the terms was to communicate that we’d like to experiment with innovative advertising that feels appropriate on Instagram. Instead it was interpreted by many that we were going to sell your photos to others without any compensation. This is not true and it is our mistake that this language is confusing. To be clear: it is not our intention to sell your photos. We are working on updated language in the terms to make sure this is clear.

Really? So you actually expect us to believe that you didn't mean what you wrote in the new ToS which was:

... you hereby grant to Instagram a non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service ...

Given that Instagram is part of Facebook and both companies can easily afford the biggest, meanest lawyers around what are you telling us? That you hired incompetent lawyers or that you goofed by trying to leave the terms so loose that you could test the waters and got caught out? Either way it looks like either naiveté or incompetence. So, Kevin, which is it?